Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (21 page)

There are many places where Jesus and Mary landed on their journey. Some have been the location of later sightings; almost all feature the Virgin Mary. For some reason she gets seen a lot more than Jesus, and Joseph is almost never seen. Within a short subway journey of my house there was somewhere important in this way, so I decided to check out one of the places that Jesus had been to during his flight from Egypt. This was in the fairly poor Cairo neighbourhood of Zeitoun. It’s only five stops on the metro from me and easy to get to.
Strangely I also knew the name not because of what happened 2,000 years ago but from my reading of recent Egyptian history – Zeitoun had a prison where Sadat was held after his part in an assassination plot against a high-ranking Egyptian politician in 1948. Later, of course, Sadat himself would be assassinated.

I took the subway there and wandered the narrow streets that lead off the wide main street. I was surprised to see posters on shops depicting the Virgin Mary – usually such imagery is kept off walls other than those of churches. There was some tension in the air and people asked me if I was a journalist. I said no, I was a tourist. In 2009 a bomb went off outside a church during a wedding. No one was killed. It was another attempt to destroy the fragile but workable relationship between Muslims and Christians in Egypt. Picking on St Mary’s Church was highly symbolic as it was here that both Muslims and Christians witnessed something very strange. Even Nasser made a pilgrimage to the spot.

I walked on amid the swirling traffic of battered black and white Lada taxis, boys with great square metal plates of bread stacked ten or fifteen high in a pyramid on their heads as they weave on bicycles through the jammed cars, donkey carts loaded with scrap and men carrying a knife-sharpening wheel, always accompanied by a child; all this is part of the attraction of Zeitoun. Oh yes, and the Virgin Mary appeared there in 1968.

A Muslim bus mechanic, Farouk Mohamed Atwa, was the first to see something strange on 2 April 1968. Then two more men guarding a parking lot agreed that there was a young woman on the roof opposite trying to commit suicide. The lot was just across the street from the church in Tamambay Street. The woman was on the domed roof. As the men shouted to her a crowd began to gather. It got larger and larger – as crowds quickly do in Cairo. Then someone noticed that the dome was far too steep for someone to walk upon. At that point the shouts of concern gave way to veneration and awe. ‘It’s the Virgin Mary!’ No one knows who was the first to say it, but instantly the crowd knew it to be the truth.

Farouk Atwa went into hospital the next day for surgery. Some time previously he had been diagnosed with gangrene (of the foot, not the Herodian variety). After examining him the doctors were amazed to find that the gangrene had gone into remission. No surgery was now needed. Overnight the church became the spiritual healing centre of Egypt. People took photographs. TV crews filmed. You can see the
pictures for yourself on the net. Strange lights and silhouettes, haloes – it all looks real enough; one of the best pictures is of a vaporous woman hovering over the church. No one could explain it. Even the most sceptical said they saw ‘flashing lights’. For a while the Virgin would appear two or three times a week. In mid-May Nasser made a visit. He was at a real low point, having lost the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, and had offered his resignation. He had worsening diabetes and was taking painkillers, it was said, continuously. He went incognito and visited several times a week, staying in the car park until the Virgin appeared. In a twist only Nasser would have thought of, he brought a member of the Muslim Brotherhood with him as a witness. After a week of such visits Nasser and his man both saw the Virgin. It was even more official than when Jimmy Carter saw a UFO in 1969. The government put out a statement: ‘Official investigations have been carried out with the result that it has been considered an undeniable fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary has been appearing on Zeitoun Church in a clear and luminous body seen by all present in front of the church whether Christians or Muslims.’

Nasser was so impressed he ordered the parking lot to be sold and a new church built there – an enormous structure with the tallest steeple in Cairo. It had been impossible to build a new church in Egypt during his rule, so this was extraordinary indeed. The Egyptian people did not accept his resignation, and, though not cured, he lived another three years.

Science took an interest in the pictures. Michael Persinger of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada, wrote a paper in the
Perceptual and Motor Skills
journal in 1989. He concluded that ‘The characteristics of these luminous phenomena strongly suggested the existence of tectonic strain within the area. According to the hypothesis of tectonic strain, anomalous luminous phenomena are generated by brief, local changes in strain that precede earthquakes within the region. Psychological factors determine more elaborate details of the experiences because there are both direct stimulations of the observer’s brain as well as indirect contributions from reinforcement history.’

He had discovered that 250 miles away there had been some unprecedented seismic activity which may have caused the strange lights.

One of the most curious stories involves the man who took many of the best pictures – Wagih Rizk, a professional photographer handicapped by a paralysed left arm caused by a car accident in 1967. He
described the Virgin as he saw her on 13 April 1968: ‘I saw her in the form of radiating light like clouds . . . the light was very strong, so strong that the eye couldn’t bear it and was seen near the cross over the small eastern dome. The apparition was awesome. Reverence and fear filled me like an electric shock.’

The following night he set up his camera on the roof of a garage. That first night he was too stunned by the vision even to push the shutter. But the next night he did, and took several pictures. Then he realised he was taking the pictures with his left hand. ‘Five doctors, some of them the most famous surgeons in Egypt, told me it was hopeless and my hand would never move again. But the Virgin Mary miracu lously cured me.’

Oral traditions in Egypt convey a different picture from conventional Christianity. Jesus is supposed to have been married and did not die on the cross. He is credited with many sayings, some collected in the Gospel of St Thomas, some still handed down as oral tradition by Muslims and Christians. There is even one tradition that he studied ancient magic in Egypt.

Egypt was the place where Christian monasticism first arose, where the desert bordering the Nile was chosen as a place to consider oneself dead to all life except the service of God; and from Egypt monasticism spread to the West, eventually dominating the culture of the Western world. But before that happened Ptolemy had to give us his map of the world. Ptolemy was not one of Cleo’s clan but a Roman assuming her illustrious name. It is no surprise that at the centre of his map of the known world is the mighty River Nile.

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Ptolemy’s forte

Rather than resembling one’s father, resembling the times is better
.
Ethiopian proverb

Claudius Ptolemeus, known to us as Ptolemy, was a Roman with a Greek name who lived all his life, as far as we know, in the Egyptian city of Alexandria – then under Roman domination – from
AD
90 to 168. He was a scholar, famous for his works on astronomy and optics (greatly influencing Ibn al-Haytham, the first man who thought he could dam
the Nile and who invented the camera obscura instead). Ptolemy also wrote copiously on astrology, but he is best known for his geographical work and especially his map of the world. He admitted that he was ignorant of the entire world, and his knowledge of the world’s real size is inferior to that of his predecessor – his fellow Alexandrian Eratosthenes, the man who marched to Aswan and went down a well to look at the sun.

However, Ptolemy’s map, and especially the section dealing with Africa and the Nile, was still in use 1,700 years after its completion, featuring in Richard Burton’s book
The Nile Basin
as an exhibit supporting his contention that there was a second lake source for the Nile, which he erroneously thought was Lake Tanganyika (rather than Lake Albert, as we now know).

The map is surprisingly accurate; to last 1,700 years it had to be. Now that we know ancient Egyptians were penetrating through the Sahara and into Chad during the wetter period of the early dynasties, it is almost certainly true that such knowledge of the geography of Africa and the upper Nile was passed down in oral traditions among the nomadic peoples of the region. They might have been one source for Ptolemy. But wherever he got the information, his map correctly positions the four major source regions: the Atbara and the Blue Nile (with the Blue Nile correctly shown rising in Lake Tana) and the Albert and Victoria Niles.

Ptolemy is said to have relied partly on a Greek merchant called Diogenes who had travelled inland from Rhapta – which was probably an Indian Ocean port on the current Tanzanian–Kenyan border. Diogenes claimed that twenty-five days’ march from the coast one came across the source of the Nile, whose waters flowed from the snow-capped Mountains of the Moon, the Lunae Montes, so named because of their white peaks which glowed even in the moonlight.

On Ptolemy’s map the Lunae Montes lie lengthways and somewhat south of the two lakes that are the sources of the White Nile. This means they could conceivably be Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya – neither of which has anything to do with the source of the Nile – though they are snow covered year round. Both are giant stratovolcanoes and not mountain ranges, which again makes them less likely as candidates since the Lunae Montes were characterised as a range. Finally, because they are volcanic, they are not associated with a rift-valley formation, necessary as a reservoir for the Nile’s source. Given that Ptolemy is right
on every other detail it makes sense instead to ascribe the Mountains of the Moon to the true sources of the Albert Nile: the Ruwenzoris – as we have already tried to do in the earlier section devoted to this. The Ruwenzoris fulfil all the criteria of being a true mountain range, snow covered – the only mountains in Africa (apart from Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya) to be snow covered year round – and part of the same rift formation that generated Lake Albert and Lake Edward. It is extraordinary to think that this information, almost 2,000 years old, was only finally verified as correct by Henry Morton Stanley in 1879 when he explored the Ruwenzoris for the first time in written history. It was, as they say, a very good map.

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Christian mob murder attractive female philosopher

A camel that was lost in the morning is not found by looking in the evening
. Bedouin proverb

Jesus had been and gone. Within a hundred years his followers were everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Religions competed – Mithraism and Christianity going head to head. It’s nice to imagine that Ptolemy’s map was consulted by early Christians seeking places further and further removed from Roman persecution, since it was not long after the time of Ptolemy that Christianity arrived in Alexandria – Egypt being one of the first countries where this new religion took root.

Christianity flourished as Rome declined. Monasticism, which followed an ancient Egyptian mystical tradition of seeking solitude in the desert, became the ascetic answer to the bloated excess of the Roman Empire. Eventually this turning away from corruption became the engine of the Western world’s new order, and for six centuries the dominant religion in Egypt before the Arab invasions of the seventh century.

Christians were at first persecuted by Rome, fed to lions and crucified. It does not seem so surprising that when the Christians gained the upper hand things did not change so very much.

In Alexandria, in
AD
453, Greek learning had continued to prosper under the Romans, but time for this old-world culture was running out. Just as the culture was reaching a highpoint of intellectual freedom it
fell victim to the young, vigorous and bigoted new religion of Christianity. It is a mark of how evolved the city of Alexandria had become that the leading mathematician and philosopher was not a man but a woman, Hypatia.

Hypatia was brainy, beautiful, original and somewhat unusual. When she was approached by a suitor she drove him away waving a blood-soaked menstrual rag. ‘There is nothing beautiful about carnal desire,’ she shouted after his rapidly disappearing form. Not surprisingly, with tactics such as this, she managed to remain a virgin all her life. According to the early Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus, ‘on account of the self-possession and ease of manner she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.’

Hypatia studied Plato and Plotinus and mathematics under her father, the philosopher Theon. She was known as not only the cleverest woman in town but also the best-informed person on matters to do with philosophy and mathematics. Was she an early sufferer of Asperger’s syndrome?

Perhaps it was her uncompromising rationality together with a lack of understanding of social nuances, a feature of Asperger’s, that led to her persecution. Her ostensible crime was to have pointed out logical inconsistencies in a rapprochement between the Governor Orestes and the Bishop of Alexandria.

A mob of lay Christians led by a hirsute rabble-rouser known only as ‘Peter the Bigot’ waylaid her chariot. Hypatia protested and tried to debate with them in a manner fitting to a top philosopher. But amid shouts of ‘witch and pagan unbeliever’ she was dragged out, and stripped naked as a further humiliation. Naked she was driven through the streets to the newly Christianised cathedral that had formerly been the Roman Caesareum. Here she was killed by having her entire skin scraped off with pieces of shell and broken potsherds. The bloody remains were taken to the gates of the town and burned. Socrates Scholasticus is fair enough to see that this was all mightily unjust, and he calls Peter someone driven ‘by a fierce and bigoted zeal’.